I am short on time, so I won’t be quite as “structured” as normal.  This card has an excellent effect that many overlooked at first.  To be fair, until we had three great generic resurrection cards (Call of the Haunted, Monster Reborn, and Pre-Mature Burial) it wasn’t that great.  Now though, we have not only those but several card effects that are aided or entirely dependant upon the contents of your Graveyard.  The first time this card was reviewed, only Yonex saw this cards real potential, and was pre-Chaos for the Japanese era.  Everyone else dismissed it as just something for Exodia.  Oh well, I am pretty sure I didn’t get this card either at the time.  Anyway, with all the recursion we have available now, even if your deck isn’t running something that feeds off the Graveyard, you run this.  Why?  Pick Sinister Serpent, then 4 pieces of TecH or other situational cards that have served their purpose or will serve their purpose in the discard.  It’s also good for main hitters if they can be revived to full use.  Now all that is easily at hand for the cost of a recursion card.  We got some more of those recently, didn’t we: Monster Reincarnation and A Feather of the Phoenix are both unrestricted cards that meant, thanks to Sinister Serpent, Night Assailants, or the like, made it even easier to turn Painful Choice into multi-card deck manipulation.

Now, for those who have talked with me about it, they know I detest “staples”.  I am none too fond of cards that, even when not counted as staples, are “general use” cards.  The reason for the former should be obvious; it forces you to spend deck slots to remain competitive, since a lot of time the only reason to run a staple it to counter said staple in another deck.  Yes, staples, as a whole help every deck, but they tend to help some decks significantly more than others.  That’s where I begin to dislike “general use” cards as well.  What do I mean by “general use”?  I use the term to denote cards that can be used in almost any deck with no real effort to full effect.  They may not seem very powerful when compared to more specialized cards, but when enough general use cards accumulate, you tend to get the dominant deck archetype.  How so?  Well, look at how this game began.  In the days of “starter deck only” Yu-Gi-Oh, the generic Beatdown deck was born despite all cards being available from two different theme decks!  Field Spells were useless not because they were easy to destroy (you going to “waste” De-Spell on Yami when Sword of Darkness would likely be the real threat?), but because the minimal attack boost ended up applying to most of the commonly played attackers, namely Summoned Skull and LaJinn.  But I digress, let’s get back to why I really chose Painful Choice.

I disagree with Painful Choice being banned because, even though it is either a staple or a general use card, we don’t have replacements available for it (that I would want to be non-general use), and it really only makes a handful of decks over-powered.  Further, only one deck really abused it beyond tolerance: Chaos.  It would have been much better to get rid of the source of Chaos’ (and aggro’s) power.  For Chaos, that would Black Luster Soldier-Envoy of the Beginning.  For aggro, mainly restricting/semi-restricting the cards that really put it over the top.  Banning Painful Choice means little to Aggro, and is a mere annoyance to Chaos.

Why do I think it won’t matter to Chaos?  While it did afford Chaos some sick tricks, they only depended on it for said sick tricks, not for viability.  As Jae (I think >_<) mentioned not too long ago, Magical Merchant can really help Chaos.  It’s searchable by the returned Sangan, and since you probably are running at Book of Moon anyway and you need Light Monsters, searching it out with Shining Angel can still prove useful.  Magical Merchant, for those who have forgotten, is a small flip effect Monster which basically dumps the top cards from your deck until you hit a Spell or Trap card.  With those recent recursion additions, it’s even less a problem than before to discard large quantities of Monsters.  It is a hair slower, but speed tends to be a relative concept: the loss of Painful Choice slows many decks far worse than it hit Chaos, or Chaos was just so much faster than those decks to begin with it makes little difference.  We also got Graceful Charity back.  Like Painful Choice, it either speeds up Chaos as much as most any other deck, or it ends up increasing its lead.

Ratings

Traditional: 4/5-Feed the Chaos, or pretty much anything else.

Advanced: 4/5-Same thing until it gets banned.

Limited: 4/5-Chuck all the filler you were forced to run or maybe if you are lucky, be able to draw the one of five cards that you need to win (“I only had a tribute Monster…”).